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Pregnancy Update Week 34

I hope that the bulk of my updates from now until the birth fall into the Preparations for Baby category. We have our shower this weekend and I am beyond excited, but also a bit nervous because there is still about $700 worth of high priority, necessary items that haven’t been purchased off our registry. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that some people just didn’t mark registry items as purchased when they went shopping, or that we will at least get gift receipts for the things we just don’t need.

This week I washed and organized all of the newborn and small cloth diapers (not including the All-In-Two system that we are still hoping to get at the shower). This is a picture of newborn, small, and medium fitted diapers for size comparison. The newborn is about the size of my fist. Ridiculously cute.

This week we also put all the books on the new shelves in the nursery, mounted the felt woodland mobile that my wife made, and sorted the hand-me-down clothing we have already received by size. We’ll wait to wash clothes until after the shower.

There are also less fun, slightly bureaucratic tasks that we have planned for August:

infant first aid training (Aug 10 & 11)

complete Power of Attorney and Will

Install the car seat

Oh and…

Attend a Le Leache group (on Aug 17th) to get to know the crowd and get some advance breast feeding tips before the birth.

buy nursing bras and tank tops

Group B Strep Test

The midwife loaded me up with info on the group B strep test which will be done at the next appointment (36 weeks). My wife and I heatedly debated the pros and cons of testing. I am going to spend the next two weeks doing a bunch of old wives tale preventions like loading up on probiotics and vitamin C to try to up my odds of testing negative. Having to get IV antibiotics during labour is not something I would be happy about, but the heavy use of probiotics would hopefully be useful to protect some of the good vaginal microbiome if it came down to that.

Bodily Experiences This Week

Nothing new. Sleep is still a challenge, restless legs, hips and back hurt when I push myself too hard, hot and sweaty, peeing all the time.

Lost 4 pounds since last midwife appointment. I guess that huge gain (11 pounds in 2 weeks) was part of a big fluctuation. Probably water weight from swelling up in the heat.

I am so f***ing excited to meet this baby.

Baby This Week

5 pounds, 18″ long

smooth skin! All that baby fat has rounded her out and gotten rid of the excess wrinkles in her skin.

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4 thoughts on “Pregnancy Update Week 34”

You are so organized! Bingo is two and a half and I still don’t have a will or first aid training. I also learned how to install a car seat as we were leaving the hospital with her. Let’s not even talk about the state of poor Powerball’s nursery/nook…

Unfortunately it was mom guilt that convinced me to have it done. There was a nagging voice in the back of my head that i was risking my baby’s life by being stubborn about my ideals. There are statistics out there that support both sides of the argument (to give give antibiotics or not), and my wife’s argument was “if there’s even a .5% chance that the baby could die, that’s not a risk worth taking”. I tend to be hyper critical of sweeping, general recommendations that ALL women get screened for something and that ALL women who screen positive should take a serious preventative measure. I am going to do the test because I want to know if this is something I will even have to worry about. If I test positive, I will probably reopen the discussion with my wife and the midwives about whether or not we will use antibiotics.